At APEXPosed in Brussels I attended a presentation by Lucas Jellema called "Reaching out from PL/SQL". It was all about leveraging the central position of the Oracle database in the application architecture. Of course the examples were accompanied by some fine demo's. One of them was sending and receiving email by the database: You could ask the database a question, and the database answered that one. Another one was sending instant messages from the database when some data was changed. Interesting stuff! So I decided to combine those two: Why not chat with the database? Ask the database a question using an IM client and the database will (try to) answer to that question... I started off with downloading and installing the Oracle-XMPP code (XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). Because I needed my own XMPP-server, I also downloaded and installed OpenFire. One of the options when installing OpenFire is to use an Oracle Database for storing the data (u…

In theory it should be so easy...running an APEX application on an Oracle instance with database links to MySQL for retrieving and modifying data. In theory that is, because in practice it is somewhat more cumbersome. I finally got there, but it took some steps - and patience...

I started off with the steps provided from a couple of websites. Like these from Birijan, from Pythian, from WebAJ and from Easysoft. They´re all not the most recent ones, so I downloaded the latest versions of MySQL (5.1.51), MySQL Connector for ODBC (5.1.7) and unixODBC (2.3.0) and installed this stuff on top of the Oracle Developer Days Virtual Machine. Following the steps provided on the sites earlier mentioned I had a MySQL database with a demo table within minutes. So far so good!

After changing the odbcinst.ini, odbc.ini, tlistener.ora, tnsnames.ora and the initmysql.ora (in $ORACLE_HOME/hs/admin) file I fired up SQL*Plus and created a databaselink using create database link mysql
connect to "dem…

Last week the first European OPP / APEXposed ever was held in Brussels. And just like the US originals - which I actually never was able to attend - this also was a huge success, when you listen to all the positive feedback and comments issued in the hallways of the Brussel's Sheraton. In two days there were 9 sessions to attend in 4 to 5 tracks. And even which such a relative small number of tracks it was hard to pick just one...so many interesting presentations! APEXposed kicked off with a keynote by Patrick Wolf, in which he addressed all the nice new APEX 4.0 features at a glance. All of these features deserved a presentation on their own, and luckily most of them got one during the conference. Next I attended a session by Steven Feuerstein (he did 8 ! in these two days) about PL/SQL for APEX Developers. The key thing here was: develop your application as it was a regular PL/SQL based application, so use packages, test thoroughly, handle your errors well and code as less PL/SQL…